Replicating the Hospital Elder Life Program in a community hospital and demonstrating effectiveness using quality improvement methodology.

Objectives: To evaluate a replication of the Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP), a quality-improvement model, in a community hospital without a research infrastructure, using administrative data.

Design: A pretest/posttest quality-improvement study.

Setting: A 500-bed community teaching hospital in western Pennsylvania.

Preliminary study of ciprofloxacin in active Crohn's disease.

Based on limited reports of the successful use of antibiotics in the treatment of Crohn's disease (CD) and on the possibility that intestinal bacteria may be one of the etiologic factors playing a role in the pathogenesis of this condition, we undertook a study to evaluate the use of a broad-spectrum antibiotic in CD. Our team studied the efficacy of adding the antibiotic ciprofloxacin to the treatment of moderately active, but resistant cases of CD. Forty-seven adults with moderately active CD were randomly assigned treatment with ciprofloxacin 500 mg twice daily versus placebo twice daily for 6 months.